Not sure how I missed this announcement, but here it is:

I’m happy to announce the launch of a new group blog on language in China. Contributors include Sima and Paweł of Echoes of Manchu, Randy of Echoes of Manchu and Yuwen, Syz of Beijing Sounds, Duncan of the Naxi Script Resource Center and myself, of here.

The blog is Sinoglot, found at sinoglot.com. Note that the content is original. That is, it is not simply a replaying of entries from the other sites. We’ve gotten off to a good start and have already had some interesting discussion on many of the articles. Take a look.

More Wu to come.

Today marks one year since the official launch of Annals of Wu. The site was set up in large part to help myself learn as much of the language as I could without formal (or even very directed) study, and I gotta say I’m not disappointed with the results. The comments have one more than one occasion yielded much more interesting directions than I might have been inclined to follow on my own. So thanks to everyone who has left comments and given me something to think about.

For the coming year expect more sound files, more instructional posts and possibly some branching out into other platforms. More on that last one later. I’ll also be adding a search function to the site which is much overdo.

In other news, some of you may have noticed the domain change. That’s part of a larger migration and upcoming project which isn’t quite ready yet. But when it is I think you’ll like it.

Big stuff planned for the year. Stay tuned.

A few things. First, as has been requested, you can now subscribe to this site by email. This is through Google’s Feedburner and will send you posts via email as they’re published here.

Second, you may have noticed 星期沪 has taken a nose dive. I’ve become much busier with my grad classes and in addition to that have picked up some part-time work in order to keep my electricity on. Something had to give and weekly Shanghainese tweets seemed an obvious choice. I’ll probably pick it up again in the future, but likely not until the semester ends.

Lastly, despite the busier schedule I’m putting some more time into other Wu dialects. I’m planning a couple trips into Jiangsu for the dual purposes of collecting books and collecting more audio recordings. More exciting (for me anyway) is December’s minor topolect post, which is the most complete yet, including about 5 minutes of audio. That will be posted after I find some time to transcribe the last few pieces. And while it’s not Shanghainese, it may still be of some value to those of you living in the city. More on that later.

Keep your eyes open for that in a week or so.

We’ve been talking about transcription a few posts back and the rather unorthodox method used in some sources. Logically “bh” seems like it ought to correspond to [bʰ], not [b], but as we’ve seen, that’s not really the case in some texts. So I’ve thrown together a quick comparison of four different methods of transcription for Wu, as well as including pinyin for Modern Standard Mandarin.

I didn’t include endings in this, though really that’s where the biggest differences are. For example depending on the source cases y could be [y], [ẓ] (aka [ɿ]) or [i], not to mention the extreme variation for something as simple as [ã]. But that would be incredibly time consuming and this is really just to get a general idea of the variety.

Top row is International Phonetic Alphabet, Shanghainese Pinyin^*, Standard Mandarin Pinyin. Second row is Long-short transcription and the Wu Association transcription.

Now you see why I’m such a big supporter of using IPA. Standard IPA. Even though I really do like [ɿ] for [ẓ], having an internationally accepted standard is a pretty big convenience. The only reason I even use things like [ɿ] and [ȵ] are because they’re so widely understood in terms of Chinese topolects, even if a little obsolete.

It’s like the Esperanto of transcription, except that it’s actually useful to learn.

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* as used by 上海辞书出版社 in their pinyin Shanghainese dictionary.